Marilyn Monroe

Photo of Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold, 1955

Photographer Eve Arnold had a long and productive life: she died in London in January 2012, aged 99. I was honored to meet her a few years before she passed on. She took hundreds of photos of Marilyn Monroe, and is responsible for a remarkable 1955 color photo of Marilyn Monroe reading the last chapter of «Ulysses» by James Joyce in a Long Island playground. There is a gentle irony in MM’s choice of the last chapter.

In «Joyce and Popular Culture», R.B. Kershner quotes a letter from Arnold about the day she took the shot:

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics."

An introduction to the Black Writers Museum

“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” ― Jorge Luis Borges

If Borges is right, then an archive of books is also a being, albeit a larger one, representing a far more vast “axis of innumerable relationships.” The Black Writers Museum in Germantown, Pennsylvania, bears out this theory, placing books at the center of a community’s identity and its plight. Its founder, poet and activist Supreme Dow, happens to also be something of a human athenaeum; a trove of knowledge of black literature, history, and civil rights. And so this particular archive is not the dusty repository of a distant past, but a being in relationship that breathes and walks among its readers.